“We may delude ourselves, but that’s hardly the point. We must give voice to the irrational as an act of conscience. It’s the closest thing we have to prayer.” - from 'The Siren of Montmartre' by Leopold Nacht

Friday, July 22, 2016

The AGE of LOVECRAFT

Just received this purchased book….
Edited by Carl H. Sederholm and Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock
Foreword by Ramsey Campbell
Featuring words from James Kneale, Isabella van Elferen, Brian Johnson, Jed Mayer, David Simmons, Jessica George, David Punter, W. Scott Poole, China Miéville.
THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS 2016
In due course, I shall comment on this book in the thought stream below.

I have just read the first six pages of the Introduction. Very satisfying fare. Highly textured with mind-awakening philosophy, even at this early stage of the book. “Why Lovecraft, why now?” Cosmic indifferentism seems akin to the results of gestalt real-time reviewing fiction books as objects become preternatural forces separate from humanity. Do they retain such power even if no-one reads them? impossible to answer, of course.

The introduction deals thoroughly with the whys and wherefores of the high profile of Lovecraft in modern days, his racism etc etc
The first essay proper is:GHOULISH DIALOGUES: HP Lovecraft’s Weird Geographies by James Kneale (cultural and historical geographer at University College London.)
My review will continue in due course below….

From Introduction – “Since one purpose of this book is to reflect on the significance of Lovecraft’s increasing popularity, not to mention his marked impact on early twentieth-first-century discourse, we cannot dismiss the problem of racism as irrelevant, nor can we resolve it to everyone’s satisfaction.”

MY EARLIER REAL-TIME REVIEW OF “THE HAUNTER OF THE DARK” Panther COLLECTION, AT THE BOTTOM OF WHICH PAGE IS ALSO A LINK TO MY REVIEW OF ‘THE DREAM QUEST OF UNKNOWN KADATH’: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2015/04/21/the-haunter-of-the-dark-hp-lovecraft/
—————–
I have now read the first few pages of the James Kneale essay where we seem to be given permission to brainstorm upon HPL’s style and influence, where, just as one example, style awkwardness can lead to some sort of weird truth or insight (as my review above has ALREADY done!) i.e.:-
“The Age of Lovecraft might, in fact, be weirder than many of the fictions in his name.”
Weird style outweighing its weird content.
More later…

Content versus style, a tension that concerned me personally ever since studying Russian Formalism in the 1960s and Wimsatt’s Intentional Fallacy. There is much food for thought in this essay, cubism and triangulation, and objects seen in their own right as flensed and flayed from under ‘unimagined’ layers of allusion. And his stories’ triangulated growing technics of transmission now taken further abroad within HPL’s residual ‘gray areas’ and spacing – as sexed up by the Internet? References to Poe, Miéville and Stross. And Graham Harman.

Looking back from the beyond of HPL’s Gothic narratives, and by dealing with the Gothic as THING-POWER, there are factored in, inter alia, Danielewski’s HOUSE oF Leaves, KIngs’s Overlook Hotel, Poe’s House of Usher, the Whovian TARDIS, and forbidden texts like The Necronomicon, and we are given a decidedly oblique slant on Lovecraft fiction texts, text that radiates more than what the words themselves mean, I guess. And, for me these thing-powers represent the flotsam and jetsam that I myself talked about in 2006:-
“It is much more complex than simple suspension of belief (or even disbelief). Horror fiction, at its best, enters our individual territories and becomes part and parcel of a revolving realm with Death at its core: and, in this realm, all the flotsam and jetsam of life (the richest life being generated by the imagination as well as by the day-to-day interaction of our minds and bodies) spin round, some colliding only to ricochet off, others sticking together, some being swallowed whole or bit by bit. Eventually, the various items are sucked into the core where they are minced up or refined into streams of sense (or apparent sense or, even, nonsense) which are then released from that realm into other revolving realms which create new collisions, fusions and spin-offs. This is using Death as a positive tool, as it surely is. Without Death, we’d be nothing.”Above quoted from my blog here in 2006: http://weirdmonger.blogspot.co.uk/2006/04/free-fiction.html

The third essay is HYPER-CACOPHONY: Lovecraft, Speculative Realism, and Sonic Materialism By Isabella van Elferen (Professor of music and director of research for the School of Performance and Screen Studies at Kingston University London.)

“Thus, the ‘shrieking, roaring confusion of sound’ (Lovecraft, ‘Witch House,’ 305) that thunders through his weird universes signifies both Lovecraft’s kinship to and irreconcilability with contemporary philosophy — or any earthly philosophy, for that matter.”
This essay presents an impressively detailed litany of ‘unpleasant’ sound or music in the HPL fiction texts, in fact, for me, the major leitmotif in them. A gestalt that presents the infinite repercussions of dincopated infinity in, say, the “Ph’nglui…” incantation or refrain. Mentions also Meillassoux.
I can now no longer question my lifelong love of HPL fiction texts and of music like Stockhausen, Schoenberg, Xenakis etc as well as the slightly more mellifluous Debussy, Glass, Messiaen, Beethoven late string quartets etc etc. This essay has become a seminal slant on HPL, for me, and I shall revisit my real-time reviews where such references have permeated them since 2008 and my own reading since I first encountered HPL in 1964.——————–
My past Dreamcatching Gestalt Real-time Reviews of Joshi associated books…https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2014/11/21/in-the-land-of-time-lord-dunsany/https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2014/08/30/the-dark-eidolon-and-other-fantasies-clark-ashton-smith/https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2015/01/07/bone-idle-in-the-charnel-house/

The fourth essay is PREHISTORIES OF POSTHUMANISM: Cosmic Indifferentism, Alien Genesis, and Ecology from H. P. Lovecraft to Ridley Scott By Brian Johnson (associate professor and graduate chair of English at Carleton University)
More later…

“Just as Lovecraft personified his materialist philosophy of ‘cosmic indifferentism’ in a timeless pantheon of alien ‘gods’ productive of epiphanic ‘cosmic horror’ in human discoverers of their presence, so too did O’Bannon, Scott, and the film’s other scriptwriters embody the amorality of the universe in a deadly alien life form…”
I am sure others will find this essay fascinating, but since I have long suffered from ‘cinematic indifferentism’, I don’t think I am in a position to comment further on its comparisons with the films Alien and Prometheus.

And in the above context of its goal, this essay presents a telling perspective – from the HPL works and surrounding mores of the time, literature and scientific studies – of this knotty issue in HPL, including a fascinating reference to the tentacle’s arrival in the Gothic. On a personal note, when I first read HPL in the 1960s, I knew nothing about the author, and I then felt not even a hint of this knotty issue. However, forced as I was to learn more about HPL in ensuing years, especially through his letters to Kleiner, I, too, was altered in my mindset towards his works. I suppose, with my interest, also from the 1960s, in Wimsatt’s Intentional Fallacy as a literary theory, I should not have allowed my mindset to have changed, but change it did.

Later today. – just cross-referenced this essay with my synchronous review of a Flannery O’Connor story here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2016/07/01/flannery-oconnor-complete-stories/#comment-7676 Also, since writing my review above of Jed Mayer’s essay, this morning I had a minor operation on my neck’s long-term troublous sebaceous-cyst, and the surgeon lanced, drained and seaweed-dressing-packed it, while talking to me about its ‘tentacles’. Yes, that is the word he actually used! (Sometimes, I don’t believe myself!)

“In other words. Lovecraft’s sexual loathing, his attempt to separate human behaviour from animal action, and his apparent wish to escape physical instincts, desires, or passions, all suggest a difficulty reconciling intellectual fantasies with physical realities.”
A refreshingly open-ended and exploratory essay, describing, inter alia, possible associations with his father’s death by syphilis, the “paradoxes of the body”, Lavinia Whateley’s imputed coupling with Yog Sothoth and Joshi’s apparent propensity, in his studies, not to pursue HPL’s sexual side, beyond reference to a possible low sex drive.

The seventh essay is H. P. LOVECRAFT AND REAL PERSON FICTION: The Pulp Author as Subcultural Avatar By Davud Simmons (senior lecturer in English and screen studies at Northampton University.)
More later…

This is a topic of which I have little knowledge. A form of fanfiction called RPF and how HPL as a real person, was used, from Bloch onwards, in such fiction, and this phenomenon as relating to HPL is indeed fascinating. It is a form of Tuckerisation, I guess, and it is ironic that my favourite exponent of this device is Rhys Hughes who once said this of HPL: http://rhysaurus.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/lovecrafts-something.html

“Lovecraft is, if not everywhere, in many places — and, as such, is many things.”
“…that human identity may rely upon writing, but the identities we inhabit when we write, and when we rewrite by reading, are always multiple and partial.”
This remarkably seems to represent my long-term ethos of gestalt real-time reviewing, i.e. reader and author in mutual synergy, the two-way pecking order of author, narrator, characters and readers, a filter in both directions. The potential public triangulation of any work as it is hawled or dreamcaught through a myriad of real-time reviewers, Wimsatt’s Intentional Fallacy, Jungianism and more. As well as this essay being another revelation regarding the phenomenon that is Lovecraft. A unique name that only he and his family bears – as the final irony? A watershed for me, too.

LOVECRAFT’S COSMIC ETHICS By Patricia MacCormack (Professor of continental philosophy at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge)
“Against many critics, Lovecraft offers entryways into feminist, ecosophical, queer, and mystical (albeit atheist) configurations of difference. [.….] …to show that Lovecraft is uncannily relevant for posthuman philosophies, and that traditional criticisms of his work as nihilistic, misogynistic, unethical, and generally concerned with the maintenance of traditional values ought to be reoriented.”
I wonder if you will consider this essay meets with such a goal. I, for one, have found it impressive and compelling.

LOVECRAFT, WITCH CULTS, AND PHILOSOPHERS By W. Scott Poole (Professor of history at the College of Charleston)
This seems to me to be a bit of a balance to some of this book’s other brainstorming. Basing HPL’s racism on his interest (subsumption?) in witchcraft (as well as cosmic horror, great old ones etc). This article does not excuse but perhaps explains. What do you think? I find it less interesting from an Intentional Fallacy point of view, and prefer the hyper-cacophony, pareidolia and modernity side of the HPL texts, if not the personal side of HPL himself.
I do not usually carry out real-time reviews on anything but fiction, and I have tried, in this review, to draw out a texture rather than an acrimony. I may or may not have some skill in dreamcatching pure fiction, but I make no claims about reviewing academic literary-criticism, biography, history, philosophy, science, religion, sociology…I have found the afterword interview with Miéville offputting and unnecessary. But I did admire the Campbell foreword as a hors d’oeuvres. Meanwhile, I think anyone reading the main eleven essays as a gestalt will find a new gestalt of HPL as a multi-faceted phenomenon, a preternatural configuration beyond the tentacles, one that paradoxically attracts, repels and purges. Those who study, admire, hate or pastiche him are lucky to work in his shadow, a shadow more defined after this book but crazily even more ill-defined, too! Attracts, repels and purges, yes, and it is a book that I can now remove from the lid of the biggest purging device of our civilisation called the Lavatory. It seems to conclusively disprove a contention I found someone making about academic studies of HPL in connection with this specific book: an on-line statement that academia “went completely into the toilet with postmodernist insanities like poststructuralism and deconstruction after the 1960s).” At least we can now purge that particular myth. I hope my fiction reviews utilise such methods, among many other methods new and old, to triangulate the books I buy to read. Today’s Age of Lovecraft, derived from a prophetic sort of walking, breathing, complex, entangled Age of the Internet that is part of the same palimpsest. So, yes, the cosmic HPL HyPerLink attracts, repels, purges AND connects – for good and ill as humanity’s intrinsic nature that ever needs purging, laving, loving.end

Pages 7 – 9
“…Séraphine Cloutier, her face-mask positively owl-like above her elaborate white party dress.”
An extremely intriguing start as the masked guests are invited in for the party by Séraphine, and she effectively gives them carte blanche for stealing items from her chateau. There are rules to this ‘game’ which I will not cover here for fear of spoilers and I am excited to continue reading this book (a temptation I shall temporarily resist, a resistance for its own sake) to see if I can steal anything from the text without anyone noticing. I also wonder whether this ‘game’ is a tontine – or whether it has 81 prizes, one for each of us.

Pages 10 – 14
“in the grips of a sublime intoxication.”
…a description of a photograph of a younger Séraphine as seen by our eyes In this visit to the chateau, our eyes being those of Valérie, whose father, originally accompanying her, fails at his own theft task. This point-of-view’s description, too, of the chateau and its masked denizens is one of sublime intoxication in prose. It really is. Until we leave along with Valérie. Which of us successful, I will leave to your imagination. If any.

Pages 14 – 20
“She mingles the streams, intermixes the tenets of one faith with another.”
A blend of temple with temple, chateau with chateau, Séraphine’s son with Valérie’s father, a single and singular wallpaper intermixing and re-triangulating coordinates within itself, conversations over tea and Taoism, Viet Nam, and what was thieved or not on the night of the party. Increasingly intriguing and character-building. Even the prose style is syntactically syncretic, too.

Pages 20 – 30
“Below appeared the name of the author, which meant so little to her that she immediately forgot it.”But this book’s author, whether the name is remembered or not, produces, for me, work that grows EVEN better and better the more I read of this author or the more this author writes new and newer works about these rarefied books that are created within such works. No exception here, as V receives a book (not the thing thieved by her, but freely borrowed from S’s chateau), a book that transliterates with the temples in her own chateau’s wallpaper. V is not a yellow wallpaper woman, but a woman far more destined to have thieved, with the arguably knowing nod of its owner, something I shall keep from you until you read THIS book that will entrammel something inside you, not your heart, soul or spirit, but something perhaps even more significant. You learn to handle these “logographic” things the more you read this author. And the more they actually handle you. The characters interact either in person or by some sort of ‘homing pigeon’ between book and book, temple and temple, woman and woman, father and father, and there are the “cherished cigarettes” handled, too…

Pages 30 – 39
“Séraphine appeared a third and final time in the theater of Valérie’s dreams. They swapped identities back and forth several times within the course of the dream, having grown so intimate as to comprise a single entity in two phases.”
A golden pheasant as another objective correlative or leitmotif emerges at some point in these gestalt synergies of mutuality between woman and woman, temple and wallpaper, perhaps as an overdone version of the homing pigeon I earlier suggested. Perhaps I should have suggested a magpie, too, In view of the invited thieving? Indeed, this text grows superbly overdone, and it does not seem to matter HOW overdone because the rarefied concepts such as ‘Pao’ or ‘luminous gnosis of the ancient adepts’ actually make you the reader feel you have become one of the ancient adepts yourself. Nor, somehow, is the ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ scenario of luxuriance by impending séance offputting. Nor the arcane or pompish rituals. Nor the recurring incantatory images such as S’s self-admitted “ridiculous entrance” after which “She placed the cigarette between her lips and partook deeply of the rich, dark smoke…”I leave the text for a nonce just as V defies S’s instructions by wandering off from the séance at al. You may feel I have abandoned V, just to report so far these events real-time for you, so I intend now to hasten back there.

Pages 39 – 50
“To breach the temple uninvited would incur a definite consequence, a penalty by means of which the exalted heights of anonymity might be attained.”
Via such, for me, essence of Nemonymity, I am back, by the skin of my teeth and health, alongside or within V, where “The sense of trespass was almost overbearing.” Almost. The gorgeousness of prose,too. “Nearly laughable” as the text itself slips in. Nearly, but never. Along with V’s growing contempt for S’s son whom she meets again, and his cynicism regarding his own mother and her over-doings. I sense at one point that V is the pheasant herself being hunted by S whom V has abandoned to the so-called séance (comprising all us 81 readers which the book itself somehow gives us such status within its text, with our showing various characteristics, but perhaps too many for a single séance?) – until I see this phrase: “Valérie passed between them like a peasant…” (My underlining.)
“statuettes of birds”, “flitting like the wings of birds in flight”, “a rare bird in the night” … I am sure I myself have instead become the homing pigeon for this book? Yet the message I bring can never be definite as to the outcome of whether there is any doubt of there eventually being, at the end of this long night, a vicious battle or loving clinch between the two women, temple within temple, who photographed by whom, in this probably ever-resonating book once you’ve put it down. I must return to it eventually in the guise of moral-veering Valérie, as pheasant or peasant, or the reader “who, by means of cunning and acuity had gained the upper hand in their own interrogation.”